Top 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions of 2009

Laguna Art Museum

By Christopher Knight, Times Art Critic In no particular order, these are the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions I saw this year: Roger Kuntz (1926-75) was not a major artist, but his fusion of traditional American Scene painting with Pop-inflected L.A. freeway imagery got wide notice in the early 1960s. The Laguna Art Museum's "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction," the first full-scale retrospective of this artist, put those unusual paintings in revealing context.

By Christopher Knight, Times Art Critic In no particular order, these are the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions I saw this year: Roger Kuntz (1926-75) was not a major artist, but his fusion of traditional American Scene painting with Pop-inflected L.A. freeway imagery got wide notice in the early 1960s. The Laguna Art Museum's "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction," the first full-scale retrospective of this artist, put those unusual paintings in revealing context. (Laguna Art Museum)

East met West in the bracing "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures," and our understanding of Germany as a contemporary art powerhouse will never be the same. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a nice habit of doing that with 20th century German art.

East met West in the bracing "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures," and our understanding of Germany as a contemporary art powerhouse will never be the same. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a nice habit of doing that with 20th century German art. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)